What's Wrong with NATO and How to Fix it. Mark Webber

What's Wrong with NATO and How to Fix it - Mark Webber


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dynamic. Allied governments, politicians and the Secretary General have all, in different ways, argued that NATO’s relevance and credibility require it to do new things or do existing things differently. Failure to do so, it has often been claimed, puts the very survival of the Alliance at stake.

      And so, during the 1990s, arguments on NATO’s relevance continued. Republican Senator Richard Lugar warned in 1993 that the Alliance needed to go ‘out-of-area’ or it would go ‘out-of-business’.28 Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor in the Carter administration, suggested similarly that if NATO did not enlarge it would die.29 By the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration had fixed upon a firm position to beef up the Alliance – hence the moves toward enlargement, new partnerships and conflict management in the Balkans. The specifics of each policy were debated long and hard, but they were conjoined by a common logic. As noted by Robert Hunter, the US Ambassador to NATO throughout much of the period, the Alliance needed to ‘justify itself’, show that it was ‘strong, relevant and able to act’ after the Cold War.30

      The most marked expression of that shift was NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan. Precisely because the mission there was so demanding, it soon emerged as yet another test of relevance – a test that much more significant because the NATO-led ISAF was where the Alliance meshed with Washington’s desire to give it a ‘global’ outlook. For sure, that vision was not equally shared. The UK, the Danes and the Dutch enthusiastically supported the ISAF mandate. NATO’s new entrants in Eastern Europe, however, wanted to keep the focus on Russia. And the Mediterranean allies – France, Italy and Spain – were sceptical of a mission that was so obviously geared to American rather than European interests. Yet whatever their differences, the allies settled on ISAF as NATO’s principal concern. And having made that commitment, so, according to US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, ‘the credibility of NATO, and indeed the viability of the Euro-Atlantic security project itself’, came to depend on how well that mission performed.35

      But no sooner had NATO elevated Russia to priority status than other issues intervened. Converging in what would be dubbed NATO’s ‘southern’ agenda, these included civil war and violence in Iraq, Syria and Libya, the rise of ISIS and the Mediterranean migration crisis of 2015. NATO’s response was the concept of ‘Projecting Stability’, formally adopted at the Warsaw summit in July 2016. Coupled with deterrence and defence, a new ‘conceptual operating framework’ emerged for NATO – a ‘360 degree’ approach that responded to both the concerns of the Alliance’s eastern members (whose priority was Russia) and those of countries such as Italy, France, Spain, Turkey and Greece who cared much more about instability nearer to home.38 But what of the US? The election in 2016 of Donald Trump meant NATO governments saw the need to align themselves with Washington’s priorities – counter-terrorism and burden-sharing, most notably, and, as evident from the 2019 NATO Leaders’ Meeting, China. Further, and to counter Trump’s NATO scepticism, a more general sense of ambition was accorded the Alliance. Keynote NATO declarations of the early Trump period – much like those of the 1990s and 2000s – were thus replete with claims to transformation and keeping NATO relevant for the future.39

      NATO, as an inter-governmental organization, enjoys functional flexibility by virtue of its institutional features. But the allies determine in which direction it moves. For reasons we consider in Chapter 2, the US stands head and shoulders above the others. NATO has consequently mirrored American priorities more often than not. And that is relevant here because US foreign policy has historically been expansive, indeed global, in scope.

      That impulse was especially evident in the 1990s. President George H.W. Bush had already imagined a reconfiguration of global politics – a US-led ‘new world order’ – as the Cold War came to an end and the US assembled a military coalition in early 1991 to reverse Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Bill Clinton, upon assuming office in 1993, was initially hesitant to take on the mantle of global leadership, but by its end his was an administration characterized by ‘global hyperactivity’, premised on a claim that the US was the world’s ‘indispensable nation’ committed to global democratic enlargement, the spread of free trade and, where necessary, military intervention to promote regional order.40


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